CartoBlog

The explosive growth in increasingly sophisticated web mapping sites will herald a new era in popular mapping, the democratization of cartography, and a diversity of map creators, designing, creating, and sharing their own maps of what matters most to them. We can only speculate about the role popular map design and creation will play in the future – political activism, organizing and promoting community, connecting people to place, brotherly love, peace on earth, a cure for the common cold, and… where to take a piss.

(to the My Maps map)

The “Where To Go to the Bathroom Around Ohio Wesleyan” map is one of a dozen designed and created by students in my introductory maps and GIS course (Geog 222) at Ohio Wesleyan. I created an exercise using Google’s new My Maps mapping application, about a week or so after My Maps was made available (in April of 2007). The dozen maps created by my students start to get at an interesting question: when people can easily (and publicly) map anything – what will they map?

Probably not places to take a pee, at least not at first.

When I first assigned the exercise, after explaining what My Maps can do, the students had tepid ideas: mapping restaurants they like, or parks, cities, malls and other places they have visited – the useful but boring stuff that maps are supposed to show. It’s as if their conception of what their maps could show is poisoned and limited by the maps they have seen.

The exercise with My Maps reinforced my idea that maps are, metaphorically at least, allelopathic. “The inhibition of growth in one species of plants by chemicals produced by another species” (source). So existing maps (a species?) poison (limit, prevent) a diversity of potential maps (yes I know biological metaphors for social phenomena can be dangerous). This is a particular problem with creative mapping tools (like My Maps) aimed at the general public who have seen mostly maps of the Google/Yahoo!/MapQuest species. What if you could map anything and you just mapped what is on typical maps?

My strategy for overcoming this allelopathic miasma was to create a few of my own admittedly over the top My Maps maps. One, inspired by crap mapper Patrick Murphy, is a very preliminary survey of dog poop spotted along my street in Columbus (see the gross Crestview Dog Shit map). Another – Who’s To Blame for Bush – is a stalker map of the few people (in my progressive/old hippy/granola neighborhood) who donated $$$ to the Bush campaign in 2004, like this judge who lives in one of the few fancy houses in the hood:

(to the My Maps map).

These “over the top” maps seemed to do the trick, and unleashed more creative ideas for the student maps. Such as where to pee.

A map of places to pee may seem juvenile, even supporting Andrew Keen’s dire vision of Web 2.0 – democratizing the web and thus empowering amateurs, leading to the populist degradation of everything, including, in this case, mapping.

But peeing is certainly one of those common human needs that correspond to a complex spatial configuration. It is shaped by laws (where it is legal and illegal to pee). It is infused by gender (it is more difficult for women to indulge in the freedom to pee illegally) and closely tied to your age and lifestyle. Undergraduate students seem have much more interest and knowledge of the pee-scape of Ohio Wesleyan than I do.

How about a “Butt Map” of campus – places where smokers gather to indulge their addiction, marked by piles of discarded cigarette butts. This is not exactly a moral map, but one of spaces created by a marginalized (and smelly) minority, as the geography of space to smoke shrinks (Ohio recently enacted laws banning smoking in any indoor public space and some outdoor spaces).

Map design in this case is much less about the traditional realm of map design – the “base map,” symbol choices, visual hierarchy, layout, etc. as there are so few options in this realm of design. Map design is more about what you choose to map: a very creative endeavor that can be poisoned by what we think maps should show.

But we do pay attention to where dog crap is, and may even be grumpy enough about it (like Patrick Murphy) to map crap for activist purposes, and we may be still angry about Bush getting elected and want to attach real faces to the money, and we may think quite a bit about where to pee or poop when we are not at home (I do all the time with my kids), and we may notice the location of accumulated cigarette butts and grim-faced nicotine addicts. Such is life and reality and it is great to have mapping technology that makes more of reality easy to map. Let’s just hope the alleopathic nature of maps doesn’t undermine the potential.

Deep thoughts, yes. But what about My Maps as a mapping tool?

My Maps is not really a map mashup (you don’t link multiple digital sources together). It looks similar to a map mashup and makes it really easy for you to map out your own data (points, lines, areas) on a Google Map where anyone with internet access can see it. You need a (free) Google account to create a map, and then can add points, lines, and areas to a map. You can also search and locate points in Google Maps and transfer them to your map.

Designing a My Maps map is severely constrained by the limited tools and map design options available. You get their map and/or imagery as the background, a limited set of point, line, and area symbols with different colors to add to the map, and the ubiquitous cartoon balloon to annotate your point, line, or area. You can include text, images, and movies in the pop-up balloons. But mostly you are sticking pins, lines, or shapes on a Google Map. The creativity and map design is primarily in choosing what to map.

My Maps is a good way to gage the potential of democratic mapping tools, if they merely replicate the kind of maps the powers that be generate, or if they revolutionize what is mapped, and maybe how we think about the world. For the latter to happen we need strategies to overcome the allelopathic nature of maps. Ongopongo is accumulating My Maps maps. Take a look and see the results of access to a democratic mapping tool.